A multicarrier communication system such as, e.g., Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), Discrete Multi-tone (DMT) and the like, is typically characterized by a frequency band associated with a communication channel being divided into a number of smaller sub-bands (subcarriers herein). Communication of information (e.g., data, audio, video, etc.) between devices in a multicarrier communication system is performed by dividing the informational content into multiple pieces (e.g., bits, bytes, symbols, etc.), and then transmitting the pieces, perhaps in parallel, using a number of the separate subcarriers. When the symbol period transmitted through a subcarrier is longer than a maximum multipath delay in the channel, the effect of intersymbol interference (ISI) between the subcarriers may be significantly reduced.
To increase the data rate and/or throughput of wireless communications, wireless signals may be transmitted and/or received using more than one antenna over more than one spatial channel utilizing the same frequency subcarriers. These systems are sometimes referred to as multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) systems and may exploit the multipath diversity between the antennas. Conventional MIMO systems may encode the signals for transmission using convolutional coding and/or Viterbi decoding techniques, however such techniques are sensitive to antenna separation and antenna fading correlation.